Here's a secret. Many novelists, if they are pressed and if they are being honest, will admit that the finished book is a rather rough translation of the book they'd intended to write.

But there are still the hours, aren't there? One and then another, and you get through that one and then, my god, there's another.

She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.

Like my hero Virginia Woolf, I do lack confidence. I always find that the novel I'm finishing, even if it's turned out fairly well, is not the novel I had in my mind. I think a lot of writers must negotiate this, and if they don't admit it, they're not being honest.

There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more.

I am beginning to understand the true difference between youth and age. Young people have time to make plans and think of new ideas. Older people need their whole energy to keep up with what’s already been set in motion.

we become the stories we tell ourselves